Yes, the bible is indeed a source of great wisdom that is shamelessly cherry-picked by your bretheren in order to directly participate in behavior that Jesus specifically condemned. Google "mote" if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Just as people who rail about liberals "hating America" have no clue of what theree talking about (It's the Constitution, stupid), people who profess to love Jesus usually ignore his actual teachings, insisting on making a show of their piety in direct contradiction to his word.

Matt 6:5-6

The point is that the word "traditional " has been co-opted for its "feel-good" connotations to refer to something which has no business being associated with the positive vibe that the word elicits.

Adultery and serial marraiges are indeed social ills and to provide them with respectable cover while vilifying gay people who want to partake of the good that marriage provides, (stability, security and love) is hypocrisy at its highest level.

Not only does your example provide a clue to "local" cognitive dissonace avoidance (Innocent until proven guilty only applies to people on MY team) but the same thinking is what allows them to excuse American behavior abroad more generally.

Invading Poland was a brazen act of aggression which needed to be repulsed with the involvment of all the Allied powers but the invasion of Iraq was the act of a benevolent superpower improving the world by destroying an existing government. Why can't everybody else SEE that?

One of the things that make discussions like these difficult is that we grant humans singular status and assume that they are single actors. Human minds however are made up of components and sometimes those components works at cross purposes. Most people though, in the course of thinking about their own actions have a narrative going which can be called upon in the event someone asks them "what are you doing?"

What I'm driving at, is that the process of self-justification is ongoing and natural. To use ondelette's example, even people who are in advertising or marketing spend a certain amount of effort bucking up their OWN enthusiasm for the product.

Oddly enough when the divide between the story one tells oneself and the facts that anyone can plainly see gets too large, its the facts themselves which nevertheless can be bent beyond recognition. I've seen it happen too often to people I know well enough to be able to vouch for their basic honesty.

Or to put it yet another way....even Lex Luthor believes his own lies eventually!

for mae to get my head around this is to simply assume that Dick Cheney personally believes that everything Dick Nixon and J Edgar Hoover ever did was perfectly acceptable and that everything ever done in response was a horrible injustice. His entire career since has been devoted to undoing the damage.

On a side note, when I saw the phrase "one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," I assumed it referred to bombing the court itself much the same way people have joked about bombing the NYT or leveling the UN.

another case where a word is being redefined into utter meaninglessness. Here we see our most twisted of trolls repudiate the Conservatism of a conservative because his conservatism is insufficiently pure in its adulation of fascist police-state power.

While this particular person lives in a nightmare world that few would dare inhabit (I suspect that Dick Cheney himself would be creeped out by excessive exposure), the technique of redefining words is quite common. What upsets me more than idiots redefining "conservative" is the true scumbags who attempt to redefine "American". By trying to pretend that "American" only refers to the subset of true believers that make up their group, they are actually guilty of the treason that they commonly attribute to outsiders.

Your giving a lecture on physics to a guy who's named after a wave-fuction.

Too funny.....

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gifs/atlhist_hires.gif

It appears there was a surge in hurricane strength in the mid 1940's so it is dangerous to try and overextrapolate from the limited number of data points that each storm represents.

A clearer picture can be acheived from tracking ocean temperatures.

here's a link:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

Oh yeah, you and what Army?

or

The world stage meets the schoolyard.

or

When Boys with Toys ruled the world.

When i was growing up, one compensated for one's effeminate appearance by wearing leather, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I guess the part about bombing countries into oblivion is more an 80's thing....

http://www.thestandardsite.com/images/thumb-11032005001.jpg

Let's you and him fight

With all the blathering you've done about the "mommy party" of late, I'd say that you're a pretty good candidate for precisely the same treatment.

That's the best contortion act I've seen in ages!

but anyone who can spell "Google" can quickly prove you a liar...

And anyone who can spell "newsmax' IS a liar.....or a moron.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/8/16/160324.shtml

Of course since the utter lack of WMD's in Iraq only exists in my small worldview, I stand corrected. Newsmax is a fine news source and its only my closed-mindedness and their abysmal track record which leads me to the conclusion that Mr hornet is a first class dupe.

They didn't stop the carrier for the landing. They delayed its arrival into port in San Diego so the the Pres. could fly out to it. It literally circled offshore waiting for the photo-op.

Indeed, I'd say lack of imagination and lack of ability to sublimate aggression and anger into harmless activity defines neocons.

They actually require exceedingly vivid imaginations because we all know they're not going to go within 6000 miles of any ACTUAL war-zone.